Gmail will break your heart

Plz send me the long-forgotten treasures in your inbox

TL;DR: I’m collecting long-lost emails for an artsy little project to run later this summer. Think Post Secret, but for email. (Also: easier!) You can jump right to the details at the bottom of this post; you can also submit emails through this form or send them directly to linkiwouldgchatyou@gmail.com. And if you think this is a cool idea, you can support it and many other projects by … wait for it … becoming a paid subscriber!!

i.

My phone periodically resurfaces photos from the recentish past. It’s a feature of Google Photos, which I’ve used for five years, and a shameless nostalgia trap. On this day last year, I was making tacos. On this day two years ago, we hiked Glacier. I’ll tap without fail, swiping the years back — disquieting the depths where those pixels settled.

Emails, however, are another story. Google never reminds me of them. Once read or sent, they sink forever into digital muck — all 18 unremembered years of it.

Emails are more intimate than photos, I’d wager. More revelatory. More haphazard. The writer Susan Sontag famously donated the entirety of her email correspondence — some 17,198 messages, in total — to the University of California at Los Angeles, where their secrets made even her biographer uncomfortable. But 17,000 emails is nothing; I have 150,000 unread emails, alone. They’re largely listserv messages and Groupon ads, sure, but I still haul them around a decade later. 

In April, Gmail turned 20; the service is two-thirds as old as I am. “We now have a huge accidental archive of our collective past,” wrote the editors at New York, to mark the occasion.

“Awkward flirtations, drunken rants, earnest pleas; friendships fraying or rekindled, personae tried on and discarded, good jokes and bad decisions; every dumb or brilliant or anguished thing we wrote below the subject line — we have an instantly searchable record of it all.”

ii. 

I have not had my account for a full 20 years — I signed up on March 8, 2006. (More accurately, my Dad signed me up: I was 16 and happy with a Yahoo address.) The first email in the inbox that today I use to manage most of my life was an email from a close high school friend that contained two attached pictures of my then-boyfriend and I.

“here are two pictures of you and brian,” it says. “byeee.”

I have no idea what became of Brian, and I don’t care all that much. He fulfilled my adolescent desire to date a boy with a guitar and swoopy bangs, and we broke up when we went to different colleges. The high school friend I miss, however. We used to sit at the same lunch table and go to the same concerts and argue on the same Mock Trial team. (Nerds!!) We fell out of a touch, I’d long believed, because I graduated in 2007 and she was a year younger

But then I found a copy of a Facebook message in my inbox — the last email I have that mentions her name. It’s dated December 2008, during my first college break.

“hi caitlin,” it reads. “i never really understood what happened with us. i sent you that card and you never responded, so i just kept my distance because i thought that was what you wanted. honestly, i was pretty upset when i didn't hear from you after my father died … you could have sent a card or something. but, i understand it was a weird situation.

“i'd like to hang out sometime over break. we could go for coffee or something. let me know when you want to get together. i obviously forgive you. we were too good of friends for me not to.”

Did we ever get that coffee, though? I don’t think we did. I have no recollection, nor email trail, to suggest I responded. From the safe perch of 2024, I chastise my 18-year-old self: Her dad died and you did nothing? Could that possibly be true? Were you just an unrepentant, self-involved bitch?

iii.

In 2015, the Library of Congress and the National Archives held a joint symposium about emails and archiving. You get the sense, watching those videos, that the rapid accumulation of so much archival data had become a source of anxiety. Never before had archivists had access to so much material: so many “cultural artifacts,” in the words of one top librarian, that “express … what is going on in all sectors of society.” 

But how they hell were they supposed to store or curate any it? For years, government archivists actually printed emails and kept them in cardboard boxes in the Washington National Records Center. By 2015, that facility warehoused thousands of cubic feet of old, printed emails.

Today, the National Archives only saves the emails of top agency officials. The Library of Congress encourages people to build out archives of their own. This, they say, involves saving important emails outside of one’s inbox: “E-mail programs are not meant to keep information for a long time,” they warn.

In Gmail, this is both true and false. True because the service premiered, in 2004, with a generous, revolutionary gigabyte of free storage. False because that number ticked up for years, but then reached 15 gigabytes in 2013 and stuck there. Today, to stay under the increasingly restrictive 15 GB threshold, you must pay for extra storage, as I do, or recklessly nuke your early emails.

In 2020, Aisha Harris wrote an essay for The New York Times about that experience: “One minute I was performing the digital equivalent of tossing out the junk mail. The next, I felt instead as if I had stumbled upon a box of old journals,” she said.

iv.

That email I found, from my high school friend, changed a story I tell myself about myself. I don’t have a lot of friends from before my 20s, but I’ve put that down to growing pains and frequent moves and other external factors. Maybe the simpler and less flattering explanation is that I actually wasn’t a good friend. I find more emails in my inbox to support this theory: “Caitlin, it’s been a while,” “Caitlin, I miss you” — why did I never write back?

It occurs to me, much later than it occurred to the archivists, that we have never possessed such a complete and damning record of our past interactions. I can tell you every college scholarship I never got. Every sale at The Gap for the past 18 years. Every flight I’ve ever taken, anywhere in the world. Most grocery lists, news alerts, heartbreaks, arguments, friends and lovers I’ve ghosted.

The completeness of this record is dizzy, stupefying: I’m using 43.87 gigabytes of data. The only way to navigate that vertiginous expanse is through the conduit of the Gmail search function. I type the names of my husband, my best friend, my girl gang out of college, my former roommate, my late uncle; some of these people long lost to me now, but eerily present in that window. Here we are planning road trips. Scheduling brunches. Sharing links, of course. There I am, typing smilies with parentheses and colons, appending ironic “zs” to the ends of words. 

When I look at old photos, I know that they’re old — I see time unwritten in my features. But every message in my Gmail inbox looks exactly the same, updated to Google’s current brand standards. 

This, I find, has the strange effect of condensing time and possibility for me. It’s been 15 years, but the reply button is there — now her name is in the “to” field; I could still say I’m sorry. 

v.

You have emails like this too, I’d imagine — happy emails and sad ones. Emails lost to time or memory or the unrelenting deluge of other, newer messages. Maybe it’s the first or last email you got from someone you treasure, or an announcement that changed your life, or a conversation you remembered wrong. Whatever forms this sort of long-lost email takes for you, I would love to see them.

Here’s how to excavate your Gmail inbox, if you’d like to:

• First, to see how long you’ve had the account, go to Settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP → POP download. You should see a sentence that reads “1. Status: POP is enabled for all mail that has arrived since [the date your account was created].”

• Second, start messing around with search operators. I’d suggest a date (before:2014, for instance) and a name or an email address (from:linksiwouldgchatyou@substack.com, exboyfriend@gmail.com — you get it).

• Searching phrases like “I’m sorry,” “I love you” and “what happened” also yielded a number of good results for me. And by “good” I do sometimes mean “heartbreaking.”

If you find anything you’d like to share for a future Wednesday edition, please forward the message or a screenshot to me at linksiwouldgchatyou@gmail.com -or- upload a screenshot through this Google Form. Either way, I’ll remove all identifying information and round up the best ones later this summer. We don’t do a lot of UGC stuff in Links … but I think this could be a really lovely, compelling compilation.

More details are available here; more links are available below. Happy inbox spelunking, amigos!

---

What I’m reading

Last Friday Jason and I took off early and drove to the beach (yes: Buffalo has them!), where I devoured the very on-brand beach read Such a Bad Influence. This is, ahem, not the last you’ll hear about this book — wait for next Wednesday’s edition — so I hope you like it as much as I did.

I’m now reading Cork Dork, which so far is very funny. Funny enough to overcome my baseline hatred and skepticism of people who publish books in their early 20s. I’m also (hate?) reading about pronatalists and Hollywood Ponzi schemes.

More this weekend! Until then — warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin